This one, sitting in the townland of Ballybeg in County Kerry, is a rath, the term used for an earthen ringfort, typically a circular enclosure defined by one or more banks and ditches, raised during the early medieval period as a farmstead or place of refuge. The name Ballybeg itself, from the Irish Baile Beag, meaning small settlement or small townplace, hints at the modest, workaday character of the landscape this fort once served.

Raths were the everyday architecture of early medieval Ireland, built and occupied roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Most were the homes of farming families rather than great lords, enclosing a roundhouse or two, some outbuildings, and perhaps a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage that could serve for storage or concealment. Kerry has an exceptionally dense concentration of such monuments, a reflection of the county's pastoral farming tradition and the relative stability of its land use over the centuries, which left many earthworks intact rather than ploughed away. The townland setting of Ballybeg places this particular example within a landscape that would once have been dotted with similar enclosures, each representing a single family's claim on the land.